i’ve recently become addicted to board games. not games like Sorry or Clue, i mean games like Chess, Go and Shogi. i’ve found myself more interested in the eastern variant of chess (shogi) to be more interesting because the game is more fluid. there is no concept of “forward, not backward”. captured pieces can be played, and normal pieces can be promoted. it sounds like it would make things much more difficult to master than plain old fasion chess.

chess is still a lot of fun, but Go makes chess look like chutes and ladders. the sheer magnitude of Go’s possibilities is enough to make your head spin. i am terrible at Go, but i am practicing and learning. i bought a book that helps explain the ideas needed to master Go. i’ve been playing mostly unrated games on 9×9 boards. this makes it easier to focus and you dont have that additional baggage of the game being rated.

on a side note, i’ve found that compiling while in frame-buffer mode can cause SERIOUS performance hits. while bootstrapping a gentoo stage1 install, i found there wasnt much speedup on a 2.4ghz intel processor over my 950mhz athalon. once i switched to a normal console (ssh’d in), things went MUCH faster. it took a mere 5 minutes to compile a kernel. that’s very impressive if you ask me. getting the mono project up and running has been a real struggle and has required some real cleverness.

i promise to post more frequently this week, its just hard to keep all professional matters off this blog.